


With Teeth

by pentipus



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Hannibal eats Will Graham, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-25
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2018-04-28 04:04:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5077072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentipus/pseuds/pentipus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So Hannibal had killed him, his hard hands wrapped around Will’s pulsing throat, their bodies pressed together one last time before the end.</p>
<p>Hannibal had taken Will apart afterwards, dismantled him like the cloisters of St. Bernard de Clairvaux and transported him piece by piece to the cold room beneath his house. Will wasn’t like the others, Hannibal intended on consuming every part of him, down to the marrow of his bones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Teeth

Hannibal had considered keeping Will alive as he had done with Gideon, taking choice cuts to enjoy together at the table they had so often shared. But there was something about the thought of seeing Will suffering in such a base way that disquieted him. And besides, the meat would not have tasted as good and Will Graham deserved better than that.

So Hannibal had killed him, his hard hands wrapped around Will’s pulsing throat, their bodies pressed together one last time before the end.

Hannibal had taken Will apart afterwards, dismantled him like the cloisters of St. Bernard de Clairvaux and transported him piece by piece to the cold room beneath his house. Will wasn’t like the others, Hannibal intended on consuming every part of him, down to the marrow of his bones.

He had started with the brain, skinned and finely chopped, then sautéed with flour and butter, served in a hot soup of egg yolk and cream. Next the heart, bound together with butcher’s twine and roasted whole. Then the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, the tongue. Hannibal ate Will’s delicate sweetbreads with a morel risotto on Thanksgiving evening.

After Thanksgiving Hannibal had driven out to Wolf Trap and walked a long walk, muscles powered by Will’s flesh within him. His cells becoming Hannibal’s cells, his power becoming Hannibal’s power. He watched the sun as it set behind the dark trees, its rays cold through the black boughs. He sat on the bank of the river there for a long time, watching a shadow of the Will he had known wade among the reeds with tackle and rod. The setting sun made the world appear vividly green, a hundred million leaves glinting in the dying day.

Hannibal walked back through the forest and stood on the edge of a wide field and looked across the curvature of the earth as it rose and fell away from him. He saw the body of Will Graham, his pale chest rising and falling. He felt comforted knowing that Will was packed tightly under his kin, the parts of Will that hadn’t returned to the earth, Hannibal held within the cradle of his body.

After New Year Hannibal visited Alana and gave broken chunks of some of Will’s larger bones to the dogs, thinking that perhaps Will would have liked that. Then he spent a year burying the rest around the state, taking one out with him when the impulse struck. Hannibal buried them by brooks and lakes, digging them down among the roots of trees and amid fields of corn and tobacco and soybeans, concealing them in orchards and vineyards under the sun.

He kept Will’s thick molars for himself, picked clean and gleaming. He put them inside a locked box on his dresser and he touched the lid every night before sleep. It was the only weakness he allowed himself, a concealed counterweight to help him calibrate when he felt alone. He imagined that his heart was a curled fist, and clutched at the centre were the last hard fragments of Will Graham.


End file.
